Language and cognition

NEWSWEEK reports:

[Stanford University psychologist] Lera Boroditsky… has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too…

…In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, [Boroditsky] is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that “the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, “but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception. “Even a small fluke of grammar”—the gender of nouns—”can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,” she says.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English’s light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian’s goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that’s a trivial finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names, suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for “in” when one object is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough, Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight fit from loose fit.

Boroditsky’s Web site is here.  If you’d like to learn more about linguistic relativity, this paper (PDF) might be a good starting point.

Can watching TV hurt children’s language development?

USA Today reports:

For every hour in front of the TV, parents spoke 770 fewer words to children, according to a study of 329 children, ages 2 months to 4 years, in the June issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. Adults usually speak about 941 words an hour.

Children vocalized less, too, says author Dimitri Christakis of the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. In some cases, parents may have spoken less because they sat a child in front of a TV and left the room, he says. In others, parents simply zoned out themselves while watching TV with a child. Researchers didn’t note the content of the TV shows.

 

The study is available here.

Brain scans reveal listener’s word recall in real time

Science Daily reports:

Scientists at the University of Rochester have shown for the first time that our brains automatically consider many possible words and their meanings before we’ve even heard the final sound of the word.

Previous theories have proposed that listeners can only keep pace with the rapid rate of spoken language—up to 5 syllables per second—by anticipating a small subset of all words known by the listener, much like Google search anticipates words and phrases as you type. This subset consists of all words that begin with the same sounds, such as “candle”, “candy,” and “cantaloupe,” and makes the task of understanding the specific word more efficient than waiting until all the sounds of the word have been presented.

But until now, researchers had no way to know if the brain also considers the meanings of these possible words. The new findings are the first time that scientists, using an MRI scanner, have been able to actually see this split-second brain activity…

Amazon tribe “shakes foundations of modern linguistics”

Wired reports:

According to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories, humans have evolved to possess an innate, biological set of grammatical “building blocks” of which recursion — the ability to insert one phrase inside another — is perhaps the most fundamental. But an isolated Amazon tribe speaks a language without recursion, and they are, in the words of cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, “a bomb thrown into the party” of modern linguistics.

Babies and the science of ‘mama’ and ‘dada’

Live Science (via MSNBC) reports on research suggesting that ‘baby-fied’ versions of the words for mother and father (such as mama and dada in English) often are the first words a baby speaks not simply because babies spend so much time around their parents, but also because many languages have mother-words and father-words that are ‘baby friendly.’

Counting not dependent on the concept of number, study suggests

Science Daily reports:

Knowing the words for numbers is not necessary to be able to count, according to a new study of aboriginal children by UCL (University College London) and the University of Melbourne. The study of the aboriginal children – from two communities which do not have words or gestures for numbers – found that they were able to copy and perform number-related tasks.

The impact of Web surfing on cognition

A lengthy but interesting NY Times article examines the debate over the impact of new media such as the Web on literacy.  The cognitive implications of increased Web surfing and ‘non-linear’ reading on the Web also is discussed:

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.

What is the relationship between speech pattern and income?

USA Today describes research by Jeffrey Grogger of the U. of Chicago regarding the relationship between study participants’ speech patterns as perceived by others and their income.  Grogger’s study abstract reads as follows:

Speech patterns differ substantially between whites and African Americans. I collect and analyze data on speech patterns to understand the role they may play in explaining racial wage differences. Among blacks, speech patterns are highly correlated with measures of skill such as schooling and ASVAB scores. They are also highly correlated with the wages of young workers. Black speakers whose voices were distinctly identified as black by anonymous listeners earn about 10 percent less than whites with similar observable skills. Indistinctly identified blacks earn about 2 percent less than comparable whites.

The study can be viewed here (PDF).

Does the mind conceptualize action in a ‘language neutral’ manner?

Linguists and other language researchers established long ago that the vast majority of natural human languages that use word order construct sentences in one of two ways: subject-verb-object (SVO) order, such as English and Spanish, or subject-object-verb (SOV) order, such as Hindi, Persian and Japanese.  This report from Science Daily describes new research from Goldin-Meadow et. al. at the U. of Chicago which suggests that

[The human] mind apparently has a consistent way of ordering an event that defies the order in which subjects, verbs, and objects typically appear in languages…

“Not surprisingly, speakers of different languages describe events using the word orders prescribed by their language. The surprise is that when the same speakers are asked to ’speak’ with their hands and not their mouths, they ignore these orders — they all use exactly the same order when they gesture,” said Susan Goldin-Meadow, lead author of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is available from the National Academy of Sciences Web site here (PDF).